The warm love you feel when you give or work can’t be sustained, but meditation can eventually be something that can feed the heart. It doesn’t feel the same as the warm love, but with practice it can keep you happy, or at least healing, all the time. Sustained, refreshed, aware, ready for the next thought, feeling, pain, ecstasy, or observation without hurrying towards these things. Its the moments before all these that you want to make longer and longer, until the thought, feeling, external observation is not something to seek. It will come on its own, it will be fun when it comes, but for now: enjoy rest as long as it lasts. It may be called “The Land of Enough.”

I have climbed the mountain

I circled the wings of the sky
I trembled before enlightenment

I traveled far, walking God's walking
   Yet I have only one foot,
       a fool, only seeing monsters
            larger than dreams, sleeping,

   I left before they woke

Where is my armor, where is my sword
Where is my strength I have only
The cold wind in grey robes, long and wispy hair and beard
My sword was always my cane, and my shield was only a promise of my last breath.

Facts are true descriptions. Examples are: in 1492 Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, or serotonin is a chemical in the brain that controls happiness. We can think about and question facts. So one investigation could be: when exactly did Christopher Columbus sail the ocean to discover America? We can focus our investigation to what part of the year, what month, but when we get down to day, hour, second, and nanosecond, we find that we don’t know exactly what we mean by this fact.

The next question is What do I mean by “What do we mean?”? The fact is still true without asking this question. Or is it? 1492 was a whole year. Columbus didn’t sail the ocean in part of that year, so the fact is partially not true. We get into the problem of meaning. The two main theories of meaning are the same as the two main theories of truth: either we mean something precise, such as the nanosecond when the boat embarked (which falls into the problem of vagueness), or we mean something interconnected, such as the web of causes and effects, thoughts, feelings, motivations of the event of Columbus sailing. All these things over time, over cultures.

Now look at our fact again. After only a little thought, the fact has become a source of a lot of thoughtfulness and questions. One effect of a fact, as Henry Adams observed in his “Virgin and the Dynamo” is that they create ignorance. People believe them to be true and their certainty makes them stop thinking and investigating. They hang on to the fact rather than allowing it nuance. Even though thoughtfulness can lead to the poison of doubt, and the danger of this poison is very real, being a thoughtful culture is worth the risk

Here is why I care about this: We have two sides of America with two very different party lines that are hammered into our brains. One side becomes so sure about one fact, while another group becomes so sure about another fact. Thoughtfulness about facts allows people to listen to each other better, because the exactitude of truth in what is said isn’t the point. The weighing of a thought in your hand is not precise, but it is the way to think for yourself. Instead of published precision knowledge that communicates to a few specialists with the conceit of an eternal, inhuman contribution. The imprecision of weighing a fact is the basis of direct human communication.

The River Po

English is a spidery language
Most languages are just a web, a network of associations:
“What is the taste of the prescription of writing, what is this Net?” Thoth said.
The ancient Egyptian web
Almost lost, but for a stone.

English tries to be its own master;
The web loses its beauty, because the creator of beautiful webs
Is an ugly, mortal monster, servile to mastery

of its creation.
“English is in a bad way” said Orwell, who complained of automatic, unthinking chains
Of words written from memories of memories, copies of copies,
a blacksmith’s hammering, hardening the chains,

Fashioning a wiring of the human mind
That allows the electric Spider to master us unhindered.
And who is She, who can spy her without becoming Other, Her prey?


“You must talk in chains, about your chains.” said nightingale


I am the fly
Slay me, if you can, for the glory of Her Empire

A dragonfly
caught in a web glittering in the rain, Suspended over a river
At a time when I had nothing, I set him free with a hurled stone
The dragonfly, chains as ancient as the day is young, fell toward the flood,
Caught the air with its wings and flew

“How dare the many-headed, of so many colors,
Fruitful, flowering, leaving,
Banana tree grow?
Male parts and female parts standing erect in the common
Air and light

Cover their indecency!

I do not want to see the light,
If these flamboyant heads see it too.”

If there were a god who could fight all the glittering blades of grass
I would bow to that god.

I am the shadow of a diamond.
I am the breath of a fish.
I am the one you love to hate.

I am the master knot
That keeps obsidian from breaking
From the aching mind.

I am nothing, really,
untie me, I beg you;
We can both be free.

Equality. Of people or even things is a very high and mighty ideal. I am not sure it is a beautiful ideal, it might even be a very ugly idea to have everyone the same to the point of equality. Equality is not synthesis, because things have to be different before they can join. Equality, on the other hand, is identity. A self that is self-same. Synthesis, such as colored lights mixing to become white light, is not about self, it is about acceptance of that which colors the light, or marks the white page. Synthesis is self-effacing, it is a form of love and union. Often when people try to talk about solidarity, a political attack will try to turn that talk into talk of equality. We think equality is a higher ideal than love and synthesis. Equality is certainly quite out of the question as far as anything achievable. The attack is to make someone who is an idealist, maybe a romantic, reach even higher for an even more impossible thing that a perfect love: that of equality, even though this higher ideal is arguably ugly in comparison.

Equality has a requirement of consistency. This is how logic comes into the equation. We leave our hearts behind, and begin a mathematical calculation. Possibly with money, possibly with merit, possibly with number of likes on facebook, or views of your online tutorial. We believe after an achievement, under the ideal of equality, (trade, pound for pound), that we get ahead of others with our work. Love on the other hand does not have the conceit of any measurable rationality. Equality is a principle that prevents our solidarity, because we require it before our connections are admissible. People will never be equal, we can blame it on our parents or our politicians, corporations or the weather. A philosophy that serves humanity should not have the requirement of consistency, because consistency is superhuman.

A desire for equality makes us recognize the world of inequalities. We may have a feeling of righteousness because of our high ideal, and a disdain for our world and its inhabitants for not living up to our ideal. Synthesis is quite different, because it means you are ready to be part of this world, to lose yourself in it, take it in, and let it take you in. This requires a lack of judgement and a lack of righteousness.

If we want to rule the straight white male, we must take him into ourselves. We must remember that he is already in us all, as we are in him. And for the straight white male to rule, he must not separate himself either. For marginal thinking of this certified insane author you are reading, and also for mainstream phallogocentric thinking, there is union in love’s awareness.

I believe Identity is a case of mistaken identity. We want to distinguish between the copy and the original, the unique person and his followers. We would like to think maybe Margaret Thatcher as embodying an ideal of neo-libralism, for example. She invites us to not care about others’ misfortune in favor of our own greed. She had the idea to change our souls this way.

Unfortunately when we try to find the unique person, we have other copies that are candidates for being the original unique. One school of thought believes that there is a kind of collective pack-mentality (not a conspiracy) of people who are like-minded. When they are public with their ideas, people want to pick one of the pack, when in fact this oligarch of an idea has no one leader, they are all copies of each other. There is no unique from which a copy was produced. “Where do the copies come from then?” you may ask. And the answer is that they come from previous copies that were dissimilar in some way. There was a culmination of similar copies that may make an original seem possible.

The whole idea of a Unique Identity depends on a beginning of the Universe, a One God that breathed life and can be inferred from the present, as so many theologians have tried to do.

If there is no beginning, there are no originals to begin with.

We are all copies, dissimilar and similar in different ways. like the wave, we keep crashing against the shore as if to battle the sand, but eventually we return deep into to the ocean and not the wave. The fight ends when there is no wave, no form… The end of form is the end of violence.

The deeper understanding, however, is that similitude and dissimilitude are a creative dialectic force for this world. People simply accept this dialectic without thought. The dialectic of similitude and dissimilitude is not necessary if we think outside of this world, this creator god, and manage an escape.

This escape depends on asking the question: Which is there, similitude or identity? Is an originality is possible, maybe from aliens? (haha) We grasp and stretch our minds to find this original, but all we have are copies to compare.

This does not preclude divine intervention. It just means that this creator god’s interventions are only true in the world the god created. The originality is not ultimate; it does not come from The Beginning.

We could build a house with copies and instructions, made from many copies of copies of ideas about house making. Materials are made to fit a copy all going into the achievement of a copy of shelter from nature. The ideal of the Buddhist monk, on the other hand, is to make a shelter within the mind. And it is better to build this shelter without depending on a house much.

An established monk can roll down a hill in a barrel full of spikes and his shelter to protect him will not have left him in that moment.

At the moment of the Buddha’s enlightenment he speaks of the metaphor of a house as a house of ideas and views:

Through countless births in the cycle of existence
I have run, not finding
although seeking the builder of this house;
and again and again I faced the suffering of new birth.
Oh housebuilder! Now you are seen.
You shall not build a house again for me.
All your beams are broken,
the ridgepole is shattered.
The mind has become freed from conditioning:
the end of craving has been reached.

Dhammapada 11.153, 11.154
https://tipitaka.org/romn/cscd/s0502m.mul10.xml#para153

Anekajātisaṃsāraṃ
sandhāvissaṃ, anibbisaṃ
gahakāraṃ gavesanto;
dukkhā jāti punappunaṃ.
Gahakāraka! Diṭṭhosi.

Puna gehaṃ na kāhasi.
Sabbā te phāsukā bhaggā,
gahakūṭaṃ visaṅkhataṃ.
Visaṅkhāragataṃ cittaṃ:
taṇhānaṃ khayamajjhagā.
Listen: https://download.pariyatti.org/dwob/dhammapada_11_153_11_154.mp3

To those who have felt my pain and to those whose pain i have felt this is part of being a human to share our pain because we are friends and these bonds we make, bonds of sympathy, without them the world would unhinge.

May those that i have named and those not included in this naming only feel the effects of good fortune and may their minds know peace, learning peace even in the face of pain.

May those drawn with a fine horse hair brush be happy, may the heavy ones drawn with rough charcoal, who barely scrape by, may they learn to love again.

Those light beings that tickle us and tease may they learn the joy of stillness.

May this world drain peacefully into white.

The most interesting part is at the end of this video shared with other poets at Lapageblanche.com. Deleuze talks about the world emitting signs and the importance of understanding these signs. In a fast conversation, as Deleuze describes, the signs are very rapid, and the other place where there are rapid signs is the animal world. I have entered the world of rapid sign interpretation, but I have decided to let go of what is not understood. We gather what we can gather and let slip what must slip away.

Most of what can’t be understood has to be filtered out. The filter that is usually given to us, the Cartesian filter of lines like on graph paper, create a world where zooming in for details is something measurable, at least until we get into Quanta. Then there is still measurable, rational knowledge to be had, otherwise nothing would be published on the subject.

This filter is very powerful and has a certain grip on the minds of the world, even on respected intellectuals I have met. Yet this filter was never proven to be logically necessary because Euclid’s parallel postulate was never proven. With the advent of non-euclidean geometries (that seem logically consistent) more than a century ago, and, further, the more recent advent of deductive logical pluralism, the Cartesian filter is old hat. In spite of this, including some famed follies of educators, people repeatedly try to prove it and sometimes convince themselves they did. Even top mathematicians of the 19th century did this. There is something so compelling about the Cartesian filter.

One problem with this filter is that it makes people believe they understand the signs coming at them, because of the automatic removal of signs that aren’t understandable to the Cartesian mind/world filter. Many “great minds” bent on knowing things can feel very knowledgeable with this kind of automatic ignorance. These “great minds” may give the impression that they know you, even though they do not. I would encourage anyone and everyone to NOT be taken in by this pretense. It is an aggressive method used against people who prefer not to judge rashly, such as the skeptic.

The mark of a genius is originality, and one fundamental form of originality is having their own filter. Accepting the Cartesian filter is a very difficult obstacle to people who are not meant to fit the mold. It is given to a genius to be a maker, and is always giving gifts of his originality wherever he goes. To a genius, producing is just part of his being in the world.

There is a higher mind to attain to, one that recognizes the interpretation of signs is a miserable state to be in. Just like how the Quantum Physicist’s idea that there is no Observer or “Self” was interrogated by excited Buddhists, only to find that these physicists were miserable people (For this the source is Goenka). They had an intellectual understanding of no-self, not a direct understanding. They had a network of signs that they felt they understood, and did understand in a way. Just not in a direct way, as one knows one’s self, one can understand directly no-self.

Attaining to this higher mind can be done by anyone, it does not require having an original filter. It does not require being a genius at interpreting signs. It requires meditation on the emptiness of signs, of the pleasure of watching them rise and fall. When you have attained to this higher mind, the signs you yourself emit almost take care of themselves. Still, there is a lot of work for me to do to take care of the signs I emit.

For the Gladdening of Good Folk

For Faith in Emptiness of Signs.

May all Beings Attain Peace of Mind.